Take a moment to think of your first memory. Now guess how old you were when you lived it.

If you weren’t at least 3 years old at that point, chances are, that memory is fake. In a , nearly 40% of people surveyed reported a memory that happened when they were age 2 or younger — which probably means they’re false.

Generally speaking, scientists believe that memories start to form at age 3 or 3 1/2. But it’s not that nearly 40% of study participants are lying. Instead, they’re likely piecing together fragments of remembered experiences and things they’ve learned about their childhood through photographs or stories.

“The person remembering them doesn’t know this is fictional,” Martin Conway, one of the paper’s authors and the director of the Centre for Memory and Law at the City University of London, said in a . “In fact when people are told that their memories are false, they often don’t believe it. This partly due to the fact that the systems that allow us to remember things are very complex, and it’s not until we’re 5 or 6 that we form adult-like memories due to the way that the brain develops and due to our maturing understanding of the world.”

Of the 6,641 people surveyed, 893 (roughly 13%) said their first memory dated back to age 1 or younger. Middle-aged and older adults were more likely to believe they had an impossibly early memory.

Itpossible that research participants remembered true events but simply misplaced the date. However, one thing is for sure: Your mind is playing tricks on you if you remember the day you were born... or anything even two years after that.

You’ve seen him play Trump on TV, but this is no laughing matter: Alec Baldwin says this is an all-hands-on-deck moment and wants you to stop Trump from shutting down the Russia investigation.

Economists say the games’ so-called implicit costs must also be considered. These include the opportunity costs of public spending that could have been spent on other priorities. Servicing the debt that is left over after hosting the games can burden public budgets for decades. It took Montreal until 2006 to pay off the last of its debt from the 1976 Games, while
Greece’s billions in Olympics debt
helped bankrupt the country.

The debt and maintenance costs of the Sochi 2014 Winter Games will
cost Russian taxpayers
nearly $1 billion per year for the foreseeable future, experts estimate, and there are worries that the solvency of some major Russian banks are threatened by billions of dollars in bad Olympics-related loans. But while some in Sochi see the unused stadiums and overbuilt facilities as a waste,
other residents argue
that the games spurred spending on roads, water systems, and other public goods that wouldn’t have otherwise happened.

The 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles were the only games to produce a surplus, in large part because the city was able to rely on already existing infrastructure.

As the costs of hosting have skyrocketed, revenues cover only a fraction of expenditures. Beijing’s 2008 Summer Olympics generated $3.6 billion in revenue, compared with over $40 billion in costs, and London’s Summer Games in 2012 generated $5.2 billion compared with $18 billion in costs. What’s more, much of the revenue doesn’t go to the host—the IOC keeps more than half of all television revenue, typically the single largest chunk of money generated by the games.

Impact studies carried out or commissioned by host governments before the games often argue that hosting the event will provide a major economic lift by creating jobs, drawing tourists, and boosting overall economic output. However, research carried out after the games shows that these purported benefits are dubious.

In a study of the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, for example, Matheson, along with economists Robert Baumann and Bryan Engelhardt of Massachusetts’s College of the Holy Cross,
found a short-term boost
[PDF] of seven thousand additional jobs—about one-tenth the number promised by officials—and no long-term increase in employment. As a study by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development explains, the jobs
created by Olympics construction
are often temporary, and unless the host region is suffering from high unemployment, the jobs mostly go to workers who are already employed, blunting the impact on the broader economy. (Only 10 percent of the forty-eight thousand temporary jobs created during the 2012 London Olympics went to previously unemployed people, according to the study.)

2. Consistent data standards governed fairly by the sector.
In order to use Simplify, foundations will need to align to a standard: a common format and set of common definitions. The founding members of Simplify will soon release a charter document, describing the processes and composition of an independent standards-setting body that will be responsible for governance, and will share the document on the
simplifynow.org
website. Rodriguez noted, “In the short term, foundations are changing the way they map their information. In the longer term, Simplify is the entry point for change — data standards at a sector-wide level.”

2. Consistent data standards governed fairly by the sector.

3. An expanded role for grants management software products.
Simplify data can not only be used to facilitate grant applications, but also to facilitate grants management as a whole. Grant management software has a key role to play in broadening the data’s use. “The grant management software industry segment is maturing,” Rodriguez noted. “Grant management companies now realize that grant management, whether a foundation, corporation, individual, or any sort of crowdfunding application, has two-fold value: 1) the value of the software and its primary role and 2) how it’s able to pull in information from many different sources and share it across the enterprise. Whereas grantmaking used to live in a small silo, now it is closely tied to how a funder presents themselves in the community and sector.”

3. An expanded role for grants management software products.

4. Trend towards better measurement of grantee results.
We hope the Simplify solution begins a trend towards the availability of more data about nonprofits through creation of other APIs. In the future, multiple APIs could import nonprofit data from sources such as programmatic lists or news sites, helping to frame grant applications with deeper views of organizations. Rodriguez remarked, “Grant management software companies are beginning to see that measuring the effectiveness of any given grant should stay within that software. Funders should be able to report on it, add to it from another source, and monitor it.”

4. Trend towards better measurement of grantee results.

Simplify will be available for funders to purchase from GuideStar, beginning in Spring 2014. The exact timing of availability depends on which grant management software product you use. Funders pay will pay $750 per year to access Simplify.

We’re excited to join with our partner,
FoundationConnect
, in expressing support of the project. Topping said, “From the beginning, our goal at FoundationConnect has been to make grantmaking more streamlined and transparent through accessible data and open exchanges. Our commitment to that dates back to our launch in 2009 and is demonstrated by the numerous data feeds and exchanges with the IRS, US Treasury and the Foundation Center. We look forward to expanding that list with the Guidestar Exchange and Simplify.”

Indicative of his commitment to the visual form, meanwhile, director
Satyajit Ray
famously insisted on designing all the accompanying material for his films, including the poster and title sequences, and developing his own typefaces, both architectural (replicable) and calligraphic (non-replicable).

But the most prominent pioneers of cinema typography is Saul Bass, the New York graphic designer influenced by Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism. Bass’s title sequences for Otto Preminger’s , as well as his extensive work with Alfred Hitchcock on , , and , were key in expanding the representation of on-screen language from mere typeface communication to cinematic narrative.

“My initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set a mood and the prime underlying core of the film’s story, to express the story in some metaphorical way,” Bass said during an interview with ’s Pamela Haskin. “I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it.”

While my initial examples specify typefaces and title sequences rather than indicate the discipline of typography as a whole, Bass’s strategy of “conditioning” is nonetheless a particularly useful way to think about how typography is deployed and interrogated in artists’ moving image.

Typography can generally be described as encompassing the rational, structural and spatial coordination of written language. It takes a modular approach to words, where those words are not simply demonstrations of language but also its artifacts. The static nature of typography thus presents a complex relationship with the moving image: a space where sign and meaning intersect with sound and image. “Conditioning,” then, is concerned with the effects of such intersection on its viewers.

Typography’s pragmatic investment in navigating through the moving image – either through indicating spatial awareness, temporal movement, or narrative progress – makes the discipline a key factor in considering how artists approach written language in film and video. And yet despite the many reasons to relate typography to the practice of moving image, I am surprised at the relative lack of discussion into what is undoubtedly a highly codependent relationship between the two.

This is not to say that artists are disinterested in the subject of typography. Artist Robert Nelson’s highly self-conscious use of language, both written and spoken, features in his playful (1971), a film that engages directly with such conditioning. Punctuating the film, Nelson’s capitalized Helvetica lists, made up of received phrases and nonsense variations, seek to question and comically undermine the use of the visual language as a space for narrative logic, clarity of communication, and a platform for external authority. Indeed, as it unfolds over 33 minutes, the awkwardness of language becomes the primary subject of .

Innovative and experimental at heart, Nelson’s strategies of destabilizing language can also be evidenced in the work of British artist John Smith, in particular Smith’s short 16mm film (1975), his composite of excessive image-word puns; the text-only 16mm films of Peter Rose, most notably (1982); and the more recent videos of artist Laure Prouvost, especially (2010), a work that presents the highly antagonistic relationship between image, text and narrative – a visual dismembering of cinema’s intertitle.

Kinetic text (originally achieved via the Rotoscope, and now the mainstay of Adobe LiveType with AfterEffects) is also a key tool in the practices of German film and television auteur Alexander Kluge, who uses scrolling text under talking-head interviews to transmit basic biographical information as well as his own personal observations of his speakers; and to Elizabeth Price’s anonymous ribbons of text that communicate the narratives of an unidentified and often ambivalent cultural commentator throughout her work, including (2012) and (2013). While the subject for these aforementioned artists can broadly be described as the structural logic of language and its cultural effects, it is worth noting that they nonetheless excavate typography’s attributes of symbolic logic, conscious appearance and style, as well as its inherent relationship to interpretation.

To extrude this relationship further, theories of typography may offer different approaches to artists’ moving image works that don’t necessarily display written language, yet still evoke a typographical concern for syntax, space, and structure. Here, I am thinking again of the artist Peter Rose, though a different, earlier work, (1977).

Froshaug’s pragmatic approach – demanding that one find and accept the constraints of the material, as well as identify the concerns of the reader in order to engage the creative process – highlights ’ structural limits, semiotic concerns, and control over the image.

Meanwhile, in his remarkable 1996 essay “
Outside the Whale
,” typographer Peter Burnhill (1922–2007) describes the state of typography after 1945 as largely owing to three factors: firstly, a reaction to the horrors of the Second World War, and the need for transparency going forward; secondly, the technology of decoding acquired and developed through the war; and thirdly, the publishing and dissemination of Noam Chomsky’s , a landmark linguistics study which famously declared that the human disposition to produce original sentences is a biologically determined state. Burnhill’s tripartheid analysis is useful when reflecting upon experimental works such as
(1963), Stan Brakhage’s 16mm film of clear tape
that contains fragments of moth wings, leaves of grass, and flower petals. Although is experienced as the flickering of light when projected, viewed with Burnhill in mind, it emerges as an encoding process that structures natural ecology into abstraction, where the projection apparatus produces the cognition of movement. transmutes artifact into effect.

As Froshaug and Burnhill’s writing demonstrates, typography and the articulation of its history (either in print, or
public exhibition
) have continued to develop with sensitivity and critical shrewdness inside its widerdiscipline of design theory. And whiletypography proves to be a fecund tool and subject within artists moving image, its uses and implications have been largely overlooked in contemporary moving image theory. A new conditioning seems especially timely.

Follow the poets: they play the ‘normal’ language (as much as fools or advertising agents, they base their shocks and base their basic meanings on the norm, quite often by departing from it, but always allusive to it)… To find the text, to stipulate the ways in which it gets manipulated, to cohere all the mutually-destructive (as they may, at first, seem) requirements into a still center of quiet meaning: this needs a knowledge and a recognition of typography. Admit constraints: then, having admitted, fill with discovery.